Dear Queenagers
I’m on holiday in Devon – today it is rainy and sunny, sometimes at the same time. Hot sun and hard rain simultaneously … but no rainbow! I’ve swum every day: on Dartmoor below an ancient stone circle in a gushing stream; in the deep and strong River Dart (I saw a kingfisher and got a bit too chilly); in the open-air Lido at trendy Chagford (the water comes from the river); and in the sea at Teignmouth in bright sunshine (with a mint-choc ice-cream afterwards as a shivery bite); and of course at Fingle Bridge where I sat in a natural whirlpool at the salmon leap.
My holiday fashion
Dressing for Devon is about having all seasons covered: suncream and a swimming costume – but also a woolly hat, my thermals and a raincoat. Plus a sundress and a warm jumper. Plus Birkenstocks and walking boots. Plus cotton vests and warm socks and trackies.
I got a summer holiday pedicure as a concession to grooming and my super bright fluorescent toes are a blast of metropolitan glamour in a moorland trout stream, as are my huge gold sunglasses (which I’ve been repairing with super glue, so far without sticking my fingers together).
I’ve just finished Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and Long Island – a kind of love story and sequel. (They were on my list of summer reads – check out the full list and leave a comment about any you have read or want to read.)
Reading Toibin, I kept wishing the characters would just be a bit brave and Choose Love… but maybe that gets harder as we are hemmed in by kids, custom and status. The books capture the claustrophobia of small-town life; everyone knowing your business, no privacy. It’s anathema to city dwellers.
We’re getting a taste of small-time life in Devon, living slap bang in the middle of a village; it’s not all peacefulness. There are neighbours with power tools and strimmers and mighty tractors…and also houses selling courgettes for 20p from their gardens – and a huge bag of chard for 40p. Heaven.
More about Mounjaro
All of that is a long intro to what I really want to talk about today which is bodies and how we feel about them as we age. I’ve stirred up a bit of a hornets’ nest with my article about the Monjaro Midlife Crisis and how many Queenagers I see taking it when they probably shouldn’t.
For clarity, this is NOT about women with a BMI over 35 when the GLP-1 jabs are recommended by the NHS – I know that has been life-changing for many of you.
But increasing numbers of people are using it who are NOT overweight, who are micro-dosing the stuff and lying about their BMI to get it. I wrote about this originally for the brilliant Vicki Harper at The Independent and have since put my version on NOON (link above).
We Do Not Care
I also wrote about a new Instagram sensation called We Do Not Care for The Telegraph in a column last week. If you haven’t come across it yet, We Do Not Care is an online sensation started by Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother of 3 from West Palm Beach who invites midlife women to tell her what they no longer care about.
From her bed, clad in an old grey t-shirt and baseball cap, she rants about how she doesn’t care about bras – “bras suffocate us”. She doesn’t care “about looking pregnant when we’re not pregnant – that’s just our peri menopausal or menopausal bodies”. She doesn’t care “about being late, cos we have our own shit to do”… or having unpainted toenails – “I’m going to wear my flip-flops, they are just my feet”. She doesn’t care “if you think I have a shit attitude, or that I’d rather watch TikTok than clear up”. If she has chin hairs, or “cellulite in short shorts that’s just how I look, God made me that way.”
–or do we?
I have to say I love her attitude – in 2025 it still feels revolutionary to see a woman out and proud blowing up so many social “shoulds”. I particularly love that she is taking aim at the kind of dreary, midlife grooming which is expensive, painful and endless.
You know what I mean: threading, waxing and toe maintenance that can easily become an (expensive) full-time job for what the ghastly Gregg Wallace has described as “women of a certain age”. (Yes Gregg, the kind of midlife women who so Do Not Care that they are self-confident enough to call out a man with sexual Tourette’s who picks on the youngest women on the team – you see we DO CARE about our daughters not encountering creeps like you at work.)
But whilst I appreciate Sanders’s brand of We Do Not Care sentiments, it’s not what I see amongst all you lovely NOON ladies.
I find that We DO CARE about how we present ourselves – but in a different way to before.
For instance, I don’t need to be high fashion – I’d rather wear what suits me with a nod to what is going on. I don’t care about being skinny in the way dictated by 1990s doctrine, and I try really hard not to equate my sense of self-worth with my weight – hard when the first question many other women ask is “Have you have lost weight?” (and if so, how). I know this is meant by many people as a compliment, but as Monjaro shows, it really is possible in midlife to be too thin.
Don’t believe me? Just read what Sharon Osborne says about how, having lost so much weight on the anti-fat jabs, she now can’t put any flesh on.
When thin becomes frail…
Being too thin is a real medical problem as we age. “Frailty” is an actual medical term, and we are much more likely to die if we become “frail”. (Watch out for these criteria: low grip strength, low energy, slowed waking speed, low physical activity, and/or unintentional weight loss. Having 3 out of 5 means someone meets the definition of frail, according to one study.)
We naturally lose muscle mass as we age – medical term: sarcopenia. It can begin around age 35, and muscle loss tends to occur at a typical rate of 1-2% a year. After age 60, that accelerates to 3% a year, according to Harvard Medical School. It reports: “…On average, adults who don’t do regular strength training can expect to lose 4 to 6 pounds of muscle per decade. (And most people don’t see the number on the scale going down, which means they are replacing that muscle with fat.)”
Think strong, not thin
We should all be weight training for our health. Taking weight-loss jabs can create quick weight loss and make us lose precious muscle. If you are “on the pen” (the colloquial terms for the GLP-1 jabs) then please do lots of weight training to counterbalance muscle loss and stay healthy.
What I see you Queenagers caring about is being fit and healthy – focussing on doing all we all can to extend our Health Span (rather than life span). You know I am always going on about the 100-year life: There’s no point living till we are in our late 90s, if we are too frail or unhealthy to enjoy it.
I am struck by how many of you are keen yogis or Pilates gals. (I swear by Reformer Pilates – if I don’t do it my back hurts….) or who run or swim or lift weights. Recently, at a Pilates class with a friend who is 15 years older than me, I was really struck by her strength and balance. I have work to do on my one-legged wobbles….
I was really struck by this comment on my column: “As a midlifer I care about my physical and mental strength, the quality of my food products and services. I want to look and feel good, not to put on an exterior façade by about my self pride. It’s about prioritising ME at this stage in life. I’m glad I have the financial security to do this.”
That is spot on.
We care about the environment
We DO care about doing the right thing, not just for ourselves but for the planet.
Down here in Devon I love buying veg straight from people’s gardens or the local farm shops; we get milk from a local collective in glass bottles. It is interesting to see how parts of the countryside are further along than we are in the cities (particularly around Totnes – I’m impressed at how much they really care about sustainability).
We care about using brands right for us
We do care about using brands that really meet our needs and understand us. (That’s why we’d love you to take our survey about the brands you like as we explore more NOON brand partnerships. We want to only partner with companies who truly share our ethos!). Take our brands survey.
We care about being smart with money
By 2030 more than 60% of the world’s wealth will be in female hands. Much of it is coming to Queenagers either because we have earnt it in our pensions etc or because we are inheriting.
Too often many of us are put off by jargon. Banks and other financial institutions are in a bind because women are much less likely to have their money under management, and financial institutions are too often NOT talking to women in a way that tells stories about our lives, or makes investing make sense. But as we learnt in our Queenager money sessions last year, there are easy steps we can take – and we want to know more. (Look out: We’re going to be doing much more on this.)
We care about work
Redundancy, too, is a massive midlife female ‘care’ for many of us. In the last few weeks I have been supporting 5 senior women with ostensibly amazing careers who have just been ‘let go’.
Their crime? To be over-50 in a world where gendered ageism is real.
it’s just not as easy as saying We Do Not Care.
I see so many women of my generation facing an internal war between their desire to move into a new phase of autonomy and freedom and letting it all hang out and putting their needs first; then oscillating back into caring very much indeed about their dependents and how they keep their pecker up in the world.
Not caring is not always realistic
I applaud Ms Sanders’s mission and whilst I love the devil-may-do-not-care attitude to chin hairs and brassieres, clearing up after messy relatives and not pedicuring horny 50something feet, this isn’t the reality for most of us yet!
We live in a culture where gendered ageism is alive and kicking, the pressures on midlife women are off the scale and we’ve got to stay in the game because we don’t get our pensions till we are 68 (and women retire with 35% less than men). I’m afraid We Do Care because we HAVE to care.
For now, her vision is just a fantasy of what the world might be like if we valued older women for all that they are, not just their attempts to stay young. We’ll know we really don’t care when young women look forward to being Queenagers, when they understand this is when it all gets good – not dread every wrinkle as the doom-sign.
That is what is wonderful about a holiday – a chance to care (mostly) about where I am going to swim today, what I am going to cook and what I am reading… and let other cares retreat.
Enjoy the summer – and don’t forget I’ll be leaving the river behind and hosting an Online Circle on Tuesday next week at 6pm London time. Join me at the Online Circle.
Much love,
Eleanor
